Anyway, last week I was diverted from working on Stardust and pretty much everything else because I was re-reading Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (Book 6), in preparation for the Saturday release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Book 7, the last one). Now I’m reading Deathly Hallows but sharing it with my wife, so I’m not quite halfway through yet (when Half-Blood Prince came out I had finished it the same weekend it released). She gets to read it while I’m at work, since I probably should be doing some work, and I get to read it when I get home.

I came up with a codename for the side project mentioned in the last post. It is Stardust. It’s named after the Neil Gaiman novel (and movie, releasing August 10th in the US) which I haven’t actually read. I’m waiting until after I see the film so that the movie can be good and the book can be better, rather than the book being good and the movie being worse. But I know I will enjoy both.

Since last Tuesday I’ve been working on designing a boardgame. Haven’t come up with a codename for the project yet, but I’m excited about it. I think it is the first side project I will complete (as progress on the design is going so well… I am hoping to have it playable by next week), and so far I’m really looking forward to playing it myself; it sounds fun to me even though I’m the one who’s creating it. I guess that’s how it should be. I’m also having a lot of fun creating it.

Yesterday I went to Best Buy to get Overlord. They were sold out, but I picked up Peaceful Warrior. So I went to the Circuit City a block away to see if they had it, and I had just been talking to my wife about how I found out that Valkyrie Profile: Lenneth isn’t available anymore directly from Amazon, and all the sellers there are selling it for more than the original retail price, so I think it is out of print. Best Buy didn’t have it when I went to get either that or Puzzle Quest (fortunately they had one copy of PQ). I was also telling her about how I’d skipped Fable (which I only ever got to play through the beginning of, since I never had an original Xbox) on sale for $8 a few weeks ago because I figured I’d wait for Fable 2 and also because it wasn’t The Lost Chapters.

I’m updating the links to the right. I just found out that Big Rooster (maybe I’ll start a game company called “Obvious Innuendo,” or just “Weak Euphemism for Something About A Penis”) is developing a video game adaptation of the boardgame Talisman, that it will be on Xbox Live Arcade, and also that they are going to release a fourth edition of the boardgame in October. All of which is exciting news; Talisman is a game I’ve heard good things about from my friends but never gotten to play, as it’s apparently pretty hard to find a copy.